Monthly Archives: January 2021

The Agony of the Big-Box Game

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

Jeremy Commandeur, a Bay Area game designer to whom I owe a great deal, once theorized that tabletop games would eventually split into two paths: Extremely simple and fast “casual games” and massive, big-box games that cost hundreds of dollars and are filled with miniatures for consumers to paint. (I personally found this distressing, as all my favorite games are about 90 minutes long.) While this split hasn’t yet happened, and may never happen, it is true that since the advent of Kickstarter and the high profile successes of games like Kingdom Death: Monster and Gloomhaven, the big-box miniatures game has gained an increasing market share in the tabletop games space.

However, while the popularity of these games may have gone up, many of them are plagued by severe issues that makes one question why it’s worth spending 10 times the price of an Agricola or Cosmic Encounter on them. In this article, I will be exploring the overarching issues from which many of these games suffer and theorizing ideas on how the “genre” can be streamlined and improved.

Promises and Deliveries

All games quietly promise something to their audience. Most Euro-style strategy games promise a fairly arbitrated battle of wits, unbound from confounding variables like “luck” or “politics”. Party games promise routine laughter and bonding as a group. Reality competition shows promise a fair, entertaining battle to the audience, who are the real target user. So what do big-box minis game promise?

It’s very easy if you think about it. Big-box minis games promise a) big cool miniatures and b) the ability to smash those big cool miniatures together in a fun way. If these games lived up to these promises, I don’t think there would be any real complaints about it; unfortunately, many of them don’t.

How, exactly, these games fail to live up to their promises depends on their genre. There’s two overarching genres of big-box minis game; the co-op campaign game, with games like Kingdom Death, Batman: Gotham City Chronicles, and Tainted Grail, and the competitive territory control game, with games like Rising Sun, Cthulhu Wars, and Blood Rage.

Territory control games have a better track record with letting players regularly play with the big chunky minis, partially because it’s expected that every mini should be able to see play before the end of the game. Cthulhu Wars in particular makes it a relatively common part of the game to get your faction’s massive Lovecraftian monster on the board. The most common issue to befall these is that when it’s not strategically beneficial to use your big minis, you won’t, and in some games it’s hardly ever a good idea to use them. So far from the feeling of triumph that you want players to have when they finally plonk that enormous dragon mini onto the board, you have them feeling kind of guilty that they summoned that dragon when they could have done something better.

Meanwhile, campaign games have a much larger issue – the fact that the majority of players who start a campaign of your game are highly unlikely to make it to the end, where they can bust out the really cool minis. In fact, many people give up on campaign games like this because progression is so slow, and each individual session so long, that they don’t feel like they get the play experience with the huge scary “boss” miniatures that they were promised.

Both genres also have an issue with rules bloat. Whether it’s because of genre conventions or the feeling that players should “get their money’s worth” for dropping $450 on your game through Kickstarter, big-box minis games have large onboarding times that make it more daunting to bring them to the table. This exacerbates the issue of co-op games taking longer to break out the good stuff because you now also have to find other players who will agree to sit through 90 minutes of rules explanations.

Problems and Solutions

So now that we’ve defined the goals and problems, we can develop solutions that might lead to a big-box minis game that meets the genre’s unspoken promises more effectively.

Problem: Area control minis games may unintentionally discourage the use of minis through gameplay.

Solution: You could try to bias the game towards the huge minis, but there’s no guarantee that your ideas will hold up to testing by hundreds or thousands of gaming groups. Additionally, players who like swarm tactics or similar might be put off by how much you’re pushing a single strategy. The better solution is to make the huge, fun minis a mandatory part of gameplay, or else so ubiquitous that it’s essentially required. This follows the philosophy that the only way to ensure players have fun is to make them.

Problem: Most campaigns of co-op minis games don’t last long enough for players to get to the coolest minis.

Solution: The issue isn’t necessarily the campaign style of gameplay. Removing campaigns from co-op games in this genre would remove something fundamental that players love in the same way that removing the complexity of a MOBA game would make many MOBA players lose interest. The fundamental issue is that in many of these games, you have to fight all of the enemy miniatures in roughly weakest-to-strongest order. Naturally, the coolest minis are also the strongest, so the odds of you actually seeing them are lower.

A good possible solution comes from “roguelite” games like Hades or Rogue Legacy. In these games, you play through the entire game at once, empowering your character when you die; the game itself becomes harder as you become more capable. Translating that to a big-box minis game, whereas a traditional campaign might have you fight Boss 1, then Boss 2, then Boss 3, and so on, a campaign styled after roguelite games might have you fight Bosses 1, 5, and 8 at first, then in the next session fight Bosses 2, 6, and 9. That way, you’ll still have the gradual rollout of content that campaign games provide while still allowing players to bring out the big cool minis on session 1.

Problem: Many big-box minis games suffer from rules bloat.

Solution: We can maintain a certain level of complexity that games with high price tags command while reducing onboarding friction by having simple base rules with increasingly complex powers. While not perfect about this, Gloomhaven does a good job for its circumstances – the first six unlocked character classes are simpler than the others, giving players a chance to get a handle on how the game works in general before they have to manage mechanics for a specific character. The missions with weird additional rules are also, for the most part, added after players play a number of “conventional” missions so both setup and runthrough are faster.

Conclusion

I have no real intentions of making a big-box minis game of my own because I feel my talents as a game designer lie elsewhere. That said, exposing myself to, and writing about, games that lie in genres I generally don’t play can only benefit me as a designer because the lessons I learn can be brought along to any future design. When I go into my next project, understanding the unspoken promises my game creates and trying to deliver on them will be on the forefront of my mind.

The Pest-sistence of Memory

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

While it’s entirely possible that what makes a game fun is 100% subjective, I’ve noticed that some things are almost universally regarded as “fun” or “good design”, and some are almost always considered “bad” or “unfun”. Having to do math beyond simple arithmetic is in the latter category, for instance; another is memorizing things, a topic that game critic Erik Twice wrote about previously. However, Erik mostly covered the “what” and not the “why” or “how” of memorization. In this article, I’ll be theorizing on why memorizing stuff generally isn’t fun and offering advice on how to make the high-level play of your game less dependent on memorization.

The Problem With Memorizing Stuff

The concept of memory being an appealing gameplay mechanic is largely a thing of the past. For example, Whist, a predecessor of contract bridge which put emphasis on being able to remember which cards have been played by which players, operated under the idea that these games were a tool for sophisticates to measure their superior intellects against each other. The only modern mainstream board games that make memorization an intentional core mechanic are Memory, which mainly appeals to very young children, and the Simon/Bop It! family of toys, which are 75% fun because of their flashing lights and funny noises.

Modern strategy games only require the player to memorize things as an unintentional part of learning the higher-level strategies. Scrabble is the classic example: A casual player can do fairly well at Scrabble by improvising with their preëxisting vocabulary, but high levels of play demand that the player memorize all of the high-value words in the dictionary so they can maximize their score.

There are a number of reasons that memory is a less fun skill to employ than things like bluffing, prediction, and planning in advance. The first is that memorization is a fairly basic concept that doesn’t challenge the more sophisticated powers of thought that even simple strategy games try to engender in players. You use whichever method you want to commit a card/quantity/etc. to memory; then you see if you did it or not. Compared to things like bluffing, which requires knowledge of your psychology, your opponents’ psychology, the risk and reward of various strategies, and so on, memorization asks you to employ a basic mental concept common to most sophisticated animals. However, despite its simplicity, memorization requires a lot of effort if there’s enough variables to be considered, so it’s taxing without being rewarding.

The second is that getting penalized because you didn’t memorize things correctly feels like an act of cruelty on the part of the game. When all of the information was available at some point, it then feels arbitrary that you aren’t allowed to reference it, especially if this lack of knowledge could lead to substantially different strategy decisions. This isn’t objectively true, as I’ll explain in more detail later in this article, but it certainly doesn’t feel good when the game essentially makes you lose for no reason.

The third is that, paradoxically, losing because you didn’t memorize something always feels like a blunder. You weren’t outsmarted by an opponent; you didn’t make a risky decision that failed to pay off; you didn’t even misunderstand the subtler interactions of the game. If you weren’t able to remember game information in an adequate way, the only explanation is that you, personally, failed, with no excuses or ways to improve beyond hoping you’ll remember better next time. Frustration – the least acceptable emotion in gaming – is born from a combination of rage and helplessness, and loss due to misremembering things produces both in great supply.

The final, and perhaps most important, factor is that discovery and surprise are important to a game being fun, and memorizing the game’s components and strategy does literally the opposite, siphoning a sense of anticipation away from the game even as you become better at it. People will only stay with a game if they think it has something more to offer them if they play it again. (That’s also why I believe that any game with asymmetric powers should have at least one and a half times more powers than the maximum player count.)

Multiple factors affect how important memorization becomes at high levels of play. The three most important are open information that becomes hidden, consistent and complex strategies, and all of a game’s components being guaranteed to appear every game (which is a mouthful, so let’s call it “Completeness”).

Open-Then-Hidden Information

Most games that restrict previously-open information don’t do it to challenge the players, and they don’t do it by mistake, either. They do it because having too much complex information available at once can be paralyzing, especially for new players or moderately experienced players who suffer from analysis paralysis. Many of these games are aimed at casual audiences. That said, even if we’re primarily designing for casual audiences, we can try to do better to make the game fun for people of all skill levels and seriousness.

An effective rule of thumb is that if components can be counted, high-level play will demand that they must be counted. In For $ale, players bid on house cards of differing values and then use those house cards to bid on cards of various values. Each player starts with the same amount of money at the beginning, but are encouraged to keep their remaining cash a secret. Because all of this information is public, you could therefore, with either a keen memory or a pad of paper, know which player has which houses, which houses haven’t been played yet, and how much money everyone has left. This is crucial information to victory, so if one player decides to do this, the others will be obligated to do so to be competitive.

In some cases, there are good reasons to not have all this information available, as having too much at hand can be paralyzing, especially for new players. Returning to our example of For $ale, if every players’ house cards were face-up and visible on the table, players would have so much information to process at once, the game would get bogged down with their thinking.

Consistent Strategy

As your players play your game repeatedly, common tactics and strategies will start to emerge. This is a natural and wonderful part of the game-playing process. However, if strategies within your game are both consistently strong and relatively nuanced and complex, it means that players interested in advancing in skill will have to memorize these strategies. Chess is the perennial example – many people, including myself, have been turned off from chess from the nightmarish vision of having to spend our precious free time memorizing openings.

These strategies become more problematic if they take longer to execute or have little room for deviance. The “Uxmal Gambit” in Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar is a gamelong strategy that first involves placing your workers in two specific locations on the board to acquire the maximum amount of workers as quickly as possible, then following a series of tasks that enables you to build many high point value buildings. However, if you don’t remember the strategy offhand, you’ll probably lose after creating many more workers than you can effectively feed. The designers, wise as they are, made the expansion create much more varied random openings that lessened the Uxmal Gambit’s strength in most cases.

Note that a strategy is different from a heuristic – a rule that applies in enough circumstances that you can usually take it for granted. Most heuristics are easily digestible and helpful for players. If your players can establish these heuristics without having to adhere to a lengthy set of guidelines for play, it means your strategy game is likely on the right track.

Completeness

If every component in your game is guaranteed to appear in every game, then it’s good strategy to memorize all of the components so you know which ones haven’t appeared yet.

This becomes more of an issue when there are many different components. The opening hands in 7 Wonders are always comprised of the same cards, depending on the player count. (That is, a four-player game will always have the same set of cards, and a five-player game will have an additional set of cards, etc.) Because you can be sure that every card from the list will appear in the game, good strategy now consists of remembering the card distribution and cost for all three rounds so you can tell when you’re being cut off or not. Furthermore, you have to remember the exact cards that were in each hand as it was being passed to you so you can try to predict what you’ll be handed when it comes back to you.

Fortunately, avoiding the completeness issue is relatively simple – even knocking out one or two components can be useful depending on the complexity of your game. Both Love Letter and New York Slice, which place importance on a certain class of card/pizza slice running out, remove one card and three slices respectively at the start of the game, making exact calculation of all the components you’ve seen so far not so effective that it’s worth the trouble.

Conclusion

It’s hard to design for higher-level play because playing with the same group over and over (in other words, the only way to experience higher-level play) isn’t as important as making sure your game is good across a large variety of players. But in order for your game to be truly good, it has to maintain a sense of fun and discovery, as well as make more thoughtful play more of a joy than a slog. Memorization is an enemy to both of those, and should be reduced as much as possible unless you have an extremely good reason otherwise.